A study collecting data from over 12,000 participants in which the listeners were forced to identity the song as quick as possible has determined what is now definitely known as the ‘most catchy’ song ever produced….and I despise this song.
Coming in at #1, as the MOST CATCHY song ever to hit the airwaves…is the goddamn Spice Girls with ‘Wannabe’, second was ‘Mambo No. 5’, and the third most catchy song ever produced was ‘Eye of the Tiger’.
The latter I can get on board with. Anyone and everyone should be able to identify ‘Eye of the Tiger’ in a nanosecond.
From TIME Magazine:
Dr. John Ashley Burgoyne, a computational musicologist from the University of Amsterdam, sought out to determine what made a song stick in someone’s memory. To help divine the cause of an earworm, his team set up an interactive online game, called Hooked On Music, which quizzed over 12,000 participants on how quickly they could recognize a track.
“We were particularly interested in music and memory and why exactly it is that certain pieces of music stay in your memory for such a long time,” Burgoyne told BBC News.
Users were able to recognize “Wannabe” in an average of 2.3 seconds, while less catchy tunes took on average 5 seconds for people to recognize.
Other songs in the top 10 included Lou Bega’s “Mambo No 5,” which was the second most recognizable track, clocking in at just 2.48 seconds (presumably just long enough for most people to lunge at their radios to change the station). Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” came in third at 2.62 seconds with Lady Gaga, Abba, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Roy Orbison, Aerosmith and the Human League rounding out the top 10.
The BBC News adds:
The Hooked on Music concept was designed by Ashley Burgoyne, a computational musicologist from the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, and colleagues.
“I work within a group that studies music cognition in general – any way in which the brain processes music – and we were particularly interested in music and memory and why exactly it is that certain pieces of music stay in your memory for such a long time,” he told BBC News.
“You may only hear something a couple of times yet 10 years later you immediately realise that you have heard it before.
“Yet other songs, even if you have heard them a lot, do not have this effect.”
Dr Burgoyne said that his team wanted to see if it was possible to identify whether the most memorable pieces of music shared particular characteristics.
“When we went to look at this, you would have thought that it would have been studied to death yet, in fact, it has not – there is very little scientific literature,” he said.
“There are lots of ideas [about] why this is the case but very, very little empirical research.”
Alright bros, go forth into the world and WRECK SOME SHIT knowing that the Spice Girls and NOT Chumbawumba’s ‘Tubthumping’ is the most catchy/recognizable song in history. I’m just not sure I can accept those results, watch these two videos and tell me which is more catchy:
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